Pain

Families are a pain.  You don’t get a choice about who belongs to your family, and you don’t get to decide which family you want to belong to.  You’re pretty well stuck with the family you’re issued.  If the family you’re born into isn’t a very good one, living with them or trying to put distance between yourself and your family can be painful.  If your family is one of the good ones, losing a member of your family or having to put some distance between yourself and your family can be painful.

When we grow up and go out into the world, most of us are driven by our society and/or our biology to form pair bonds with another person, and we seek to establish a family of our own – either to recapture the family we left behind or to try and create the family we never had, but wanted.  If we’re lucky enough to have children, our family grows but so does our potential for pain.  Just the fear of harm to your child or of losing your child is a pain all by itself, unique to parenthood.

At the age of 8 months, my daughter has just started her transition from sessile to mobile.  She has started to move independently and to make real efforts to get about on her own.  She currently only creeps along the floor like a big pink inchworm.  It’s surprising how fast she can cover ground like that and crawling is just around the corner for her.  We encourage her to take these developmental steps, knowing that they mean she is normal and healthy and growing, even though they also mean five times as much work for us in looking after her now.  But I also found myself realizing that her first tentative efforts at independent movement are also the very first steps on her journey out of my life.  And I also realized that I would continue to actively encourage her - and her big brother - to hurt me by ultimately leaving me.  I’d like to think leaving will also cause them pain and that they will do all they can to remain a part of my life, but they will leave.

A lot of the time, we transgendered folks hurt the ones who love us most by leaving them behind as we undertake a journey of self-discovery and usually change.  We may hurt parents, spouses, children or friends who cannot understand where we have to go and who cannot make that journey with us.  It’s not a good thing to cause pain to others, but usually the only alternative is to endure all the pain ourselves.  But I think that that pain will ultimately grow too big for us to contain and will probably spill over into the lives of our loved ones anyway.  Like our children, we all learn and change and grow.  It’s often a painful process for us and those around us but also, like our children, it’s necessary if we are to become mature, complete individuals.  Pain is needed in our lives so we can know pleasure by contrast.